When a new prime minister crosses the threshold of Number 10, he or she receives briefings from the director general of MI5 and their counterpart at MI6 about the severity of known threats to security and order. So Sir Keir Starmer won’t have been oblivious to the menace posed by far-right extremists and their ability to mobilise thugs on to our streets to wreak havoc. Nor will he have been in the dark about the desire and capacity of hostile foreign states to stoke fear and foment division on our shores. What neither Sir Keir nor anyone else anticipated was an eruption of violence, across several towns and cities, within a month of his arrival at Downing Street. This is the first domestic emergency of his premiership, which makes it the first test of how he responds to challenges of this nature.
It is many years since we’ve seen such a widespread outbreak of far-right violence. In Southport, a seaside town in mourning after a murderous attack on a children’s dance party, hundreds of rioters descended to target a mosque, vandalise homes and businesses, and leave more than 50 police officers injured. In Hartlepool, officers were assailed with missiles and glass bottles, a mosque came under attack, and a police car was set alight, while in Sunderland this weekend several hundred rioters, some in balaclavas, reportedly set fire to a building. In London, there were more than 100 arrests when a far-right mob, chanting “we want our country back”, clashed with police at the gates of Downing Street and threw flares at the statue of Winston Churchill. What patriots these people are.
Disgustingly, the perpetrators have used as the pretext for their violence the knife attack in Southport that took the lives of three young girls. Eight other girls and two adults were also injured. Most of the nation has responded with sorrow for the victims and their loved ones, along with empathy for the local community and admiration for its solidarity amid such trauma. So Sir Keir spoke for the vast majority of his country when he condemned the “tiny, mindless minority” of rioters both for what they have done and for their sickening duplicity in claiming that they were acting in sympathy with the grieving families. I gently quarrel with his use of the word “mindless”, because the instigators of this violence do have minds, wicked ones. They know full well what they are doing and it is in pursuit of a hate-filled agenda. I don’t disagree – very few of us will – with the prime minister’s assessment: “This is not protest, it is a group of individuals that are absolutely bent on violence.”
Having framed it as a law and order issue, the immediate challenge for the government is to quell that violence and keep the streets safe. Of that, the prime minister is abundantly aware. One of the silliest nicknames the Tories tried to affix to the Labour leader in the past was “Sir Softie”. Anyone who has studied his record as director of public prosecutions, especially his response to the urban riots in the summer of 2011, will have anticipated him taking an extremely hard line on violent disorder. He called senior police leaders to Downing Street to tell them that he expected to see the full force of the law applied. I guess he could as easily have issued that exhortation by phone, but there is nothing like an in-person summons to Number 10 to impress upon police chiefs, and the watching nation as well, how seriously the issue is being taken by the prime minister. He then called a news conference at which he declared: “The far right are showing who they are. We have to show who we are.”
The tactical response that emerged from the Downing Street summit will involve more intelligence sharing between forces and wider use of facial recognition technology. The movement of known ringleaders and offenders will be restricted using criminal behaviour orders. This approach broadly emulates that adopted to tackle organised football hooliganism when it became a menace to society. The combination of police intelligence and banning orders has had a lot of success in greatly reducing what used to be a significant problem for Britain.
While more coordinated and mobile policing is a good idea, I don’t find many people in government who think this is all it will take. You only have to observe them in action to see that these thugs relish confrontations with the police. The medium-term challenge for the government is to find additional policy responses to address far-right extremism. The instant reaction of some politicians was to call for the English Defence League to be proscribed. That would make it a criminal offence to be a member of the EDL. Here the government’s lines have been a bit muddled. When this was put to Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, she said the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, would “be looking at” that measure. The Home Office responded that it never comments on whether an organisation is being considered for proscription. Some observers argue that the EDL no longer exists in a formal sense, so imposing a legal ban may not have much effect. The far right has gone into what some analysts call a “post-organisational” phase in which splinter groups and freelance extremists use messaging apps and social media to sow their lies, manufacture anger, seed unrest and generate disorder. So another question for the government is what can be done to prevent bad actors from exploiting online methods to incite violence and organise it. The rioting was fuelled by false claims on social media that the attacker had a Muslim-sounding name, arrived in Britain as an asylum seeker on a cross-Channel boat and was supposedly on an MI6 watchlist. None of this was true.
“The legal landscape is confused,” says one member of the cabinet. The Online Safety Act, passed under the previous government, is not yet fully in force and anyway doesn’t adequately legislate for concerted disinformation campaigns. Ofcom, the regulator, hasn’t the capacity to deal with it. Ministers say the focus of government attention is swivelling on to the companies that operate the pipelines through which the merchants of hate pump out their toxic sewage. While saying that he wants a “mature” conversation with the tech giants, I heard the prime minister effectively read the riot act to their bosses when he declared: “Let me also say to large social media companies and those who run them: violent disorder, clearly whipped up online – that is also a crime. It’s happening on your premises. And the law must be upheld everywhere.” A senior minister remarks: “Social media companies could and should do more. We expect much more action from them.”
Perhaps not wanting to give the oxygen of further publicity to Nigel Farage, Sir Keir hasn’t wanted to go into the conspiracy-mongering by the leader of Reform. Just hours before the outbreak of rioting, Mr Farage issued a video insinuating that the police were not telling the truth about the Southport stabbings being “a non-terror incident” and mock-innocently speculated about whether the suspect had been monitored by the security services. For a man who claims to be an enemy of the far right, he does like to echo some of its memes. He slyly claims he was just asking “fair and legitimate questions”. If that is so, why didn’t he turn up in parliament to put his “questions”, rather than stir the bubbling pot via X and his GB News show? Neil Basu, who used to be head of counter-terrorism at Scotland Yard, has no doubt that “Nigel Farage is giving the EDL succour, undermining the police, creating conspiracy theories, and giving a false basis for the attacks on the police”.
Those saying Mr Farage should be ashamed of himself are wasting their breath because there is no evidence that he is capable of feeling shame. Here is a warning to the Tory leadership contenders about what they will be getting into bed with if they flirt with Farageism.
Part of the answer to the violent far right will come from smart and proactive policing. Making the tech giants live up to their moral and legal responsibilities to the rest of society is another must. These are necessary steps, but they are not by themselves all that will be needed. The longer-term challenge for ministers is to find ways to drain the swamps of racism and conspiracism from which the far right recruit. This is not one of the official missions that Sir Keir has set for his government, but it very much looks like it will need to be one.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
